About Me

If two people can inhabit one body without being schizophrenic, I qualify. Dorien Grey/Roger Margason qualifies. Roger, my birth name, handles the details of daily life (eating, sleeping, paying bills, etc.). Dorien spends his time writing books and blogs and, whenever possible largely ignoring reality. Both of us are on a endless Don Quixote-like quest for more readers, and would be delighted to have you as one of them.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Squiggles and Strokes

Every
now and then, an idea, thought, or realization will sneak up behind
me and whack me on the back of the head with a coal shovel to get my
attention. As I was reading a magazine the other day it struck me
that what I was staring at was in reality nothing but a long string
of black squiggles and strokes on a piece of paper. The fact that I
was able to recognize what each one of them represents—not just
individually but when combined in little clusters we call “words”—may
be a “Yeah? So?” for most people, but to me it is a true source
of amazement. And if it weren’t marvel enough that I could
instantly interpret these markings, that I am able to independently
duplicate them and arrange them in myriads of ways is equally
astounding.

Our
ability to read and comprehend is yet another of the infinite and all
but totally ignored wonders of human existence. I suppose this is
natural, in that if we were to stop and contemplate each of the
wonders that make us human, we would have no time to live our lives.
But pausing every now and then to contemplate just how utterly
awesome even one of the marvels involved in being alive and human is
well worth the trouble, especially given the human tendency to take
our abilities for granted until we are deprived of them.

To
realize that the entire history of our race is in those squiggles and
strokes—or, in the case of the blind, in the arrangement of small
raised dots designed for interpretation by the fingers rather than
the eyes—merely compounds the awe. It is truly sad that there are
far too many people in the world today—and not just in
underdeveloped countries, but in our own—who, for whatever reason,
are unable to interpret either squiggles or dots. These people are
not only at a great disadvantage in their individual lives, but
collectively act as an anchor slowing human progress.

When
I first arrived in Los Angeles many years ago I was dating a very
nice young guy whose name time has taken from me. We were going to a
restaurant and I couldn’t remember the address, so I pulled up to a
pay phone and asked him to go check the address in the phone book. He
came back and said he couldn’t find it. When I went to check it
myself, there it was, plain as day. The fact, as I found out only
much later, was that he was severely dyslexic and never learned to
read, and was too embarrassed to admit it. I think it might have been
one of the reasons we stopped seeing one another—not because I was
ashamed of him, but because he was ashamed of himself. I think of him
with a degree of sadness to this day.

Stop
and think for a moment of just how amazing is our ability to read,
and how wondrous it is that, realizing the limitations of the spoken
word (information relayed by speech alone is inevitably diluted or
subtly changed as it passes from person to person) our distant,
distant ancestors began devising squiggles and strokes to convey
information from generation to generation largely unchanged. (We
won’t go into the vast problems inherent in translating information
from one language another. The various versions of the Bible are a
classic example.)

The
blueprint for every human includes five senses which enable us to
survive. Reading is not a sense but a learned behavior which relies
upon sight and, for those deprived of sight, for touch, as in
Braille. We can exist without being able to interpret squiggles and
strokes and raised dots upon a page, but those who cannot do so are
in effect regressed to our prehistoric past and tragically deprived
of a universe of knowledge and joy.

So
if you can read this, give thanks.

Dorien's
blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and
Friday. Please take a moment to visit his website
(http://www.doriengrey.com)
and, if you enjoy these blogs, you might want to check out Short
Circuits: a Life in Blogs (http://bit.ly/m8CSO1).

1 comment:

Along those lines, it's been a discussion as of late that some schools want to stop teaching cursive writing. Why? Because most writing is done on a keyboard, which contains the printed versions of the letters and anything typed online comes out as printed, not handwritten.

And when somebody writes a note out, it's typically printed.

I like the idea of preserving cursive writing, though. It shouldn't become a lost art where one of us has to be called in to translate it for a young class.